Erik’s hand found the tap in the dream before it found the fur in the world cold water running clear on the first try, no rust, no prayer to a boiler that might not catch.
Three mornings running now, the longhouse had taken the glass out of his hand at the same exact moment: fur where countertop should be, smoked fish where dish soap should be, a room that had learned to step around him like he was a beam still under repair, not a man.
He let the dream go.
Central heating that didn’t require feeding.
A studio where no one knew if you lived or died until the rent came due.
The gap between what he’d lost and where he’d landed sat in his chest like a blade, and the beams overhead were rough-hewn and real, the smell of smoked fish layered over old straw undeniable.
The sky-lines were still there.
Fainter now translucent branches overlaying the thatched roof, reaching toward something he couldn’t name.
He’d stopped calling it a hallucination somewhere around the second night, when the threads had pulsed in rhythm with a argument he couldn’t see, two voices shouting in the next room about a boat repair, and the lines had frayed and tightened as if the anger itself had weight.
A woman crossed his field of vision not the healer from the first day, someone younger, blonde, carrying a child on her hip with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d done it a thousand times.
She didn’t look at him.
The child did, briefly, before the woman shifted and the small face disappeared.
His body was wrong.
Not broken the parts all moved when he tested them, fingers curling into the furs, legs bending at the knee but foreign.
The hands were broader than he remembered, scarred across the knuckles in patterns he hadn’t earned.
The heartbeat in his chest felt displaced, half an inch to the left of where it should sit.
When he swallowed, the shape of his own throat surprised him.
Footsteps approached.
Deliberate.
He turned his head the motion cost more than it should have and found a boy standing three paces away, maybe twelve, holding a small axe he’d clearly just finished sharpening.
The edge caught the light from the smoke-hole.
The boy stared.
Erik stared back.
The Worldtree Sight opened without him asking for it.
A thread no, a cord, thick and bright as a ship’s mooring line ran from the boy’s chest to somewhere beyond the longhouse wall.
It pulsed with a steady, unbreakable rhythm that Erik recognized instinctively as blood-and-bone, the kind of connection you didn’t choose and couldn’t sever.
Father.
The word arrived in his mind unbidden, and with it came the knowledge that this was Ragnar’s son, and that the boy was testing him the way boys test frozen ponds before trusting their weight to the ice.
Erik’s expression must have shifted.
He felt it happen a flicker of something that registered the cord, the testing, the axe held too casually to be casual.
The boy’s eyes widened.
Not fear.
Confusion.
He stepped back without seeming to decide to, the axe lowering half an inch, and then he turned and walked away fast enough to be retreating without running.
Erik closed his eyes and the threads disappeared.
His hands were shaking.
The sight wasn’t a gift.
It was reporting, constant and unbidden, and he had no idea how to stop it.
“What is your name?”
The voice was a woman’s, low and certain.
Erik opened his eyes and found her kneeling beside the furs the blonde from earlier, child gone, face angled to read him the way Ragnar had read him on the beach.
Shield-calluses on her palms.
Scarring along her forearm that looked like it had been stitched and healed crooked.
Eyes that expected an answer and would not ask twice.
He knew who she was.
Lagertha.
Ragnar’s wife.
The shield-maiden from the show, except she wasn’t a show anymore, she was a woman with a child and scars and a question she’d asked because her patience with unproductive strangers had a limit.
“Erik.”
His own voice startled him.
The word came out shaped wrong not English, not the flat Midwestern vowels he’d carried his whole life, but Old Norse rendered through a throat that had spoken it before he arrived.
The language sat in his mouth like borrowed teeth, familiar and alien in the same breath.
She nodded once, already turning it over, and stood.
“He works or he leaves,” she said not to him, to the room and walked away.
Erik lay still and tested the verb in his mind.
Works.
Present tense.
Conditional.
A door left open by a woman who had buried enough men to know when one had already died once, and who had decided to wait and see if he’d do it again.
The day passed in fragments.
Voices he couldn’t track.
Footsteps circling his position on the floor.
Smells that had no 21st-century equivalent wet wool, peat smoke, the slaughter-and-salt reek of a working harbor carried in on boots.
He drifted.
Woke.
Drifted again.
The threads appeared and disappeared, overlaying faces, connecting hands to tools to intentions he didn’t understand.
Near evening, a different woman approached.
Younger than Lagertha, darker, moving with the careful quiet of someone who’d learned not to startle the wounded.
She carried a wooden cup and knelt without speaking, holding it out with both hands.
Water.
Erik took it.
His grip was too tight both hands wrapped around the cup like it might dissolve if he let go and the woman waited, patient and undemanding, until he brought it to his mouth and drank.
The water was cold and tasted like iron.
He drained it.
“Thank you.”
The words came out in Norse again, automatic and shaped by a mouth that knew the sounds.
The woman smiled brief, genuine, gone before he could catalog it and took the cup back.
She didn’t ask his name.
Didn’t ask where he’d come from or why he had no boat.
She simply refilled the cup from a clay jug near the hearth and set it within his reach, close enough that he wouldn’t have to move far to drink again.
It was the first kindness he’d received in this world that expected nothing in return.
Erik held the cup after she left and did not weep.
The effort required to stop was visible in his hands, the white-knuckle grip, the way his shoulders locked against something rising in his throat that had no name and no outlet.
He was alive.
He had drowned and been pulled from the tide and given shelter and water, and the cost of all of it was a future he couldn’t see and a purpose he didn’t understand and a body that wasn’t his and a sight that wouldn’t stop showing him threads he didn’t know how to read.
The sky-lines pulsed overhead, faint and patient and waiting.
He set the cup down.
Closed his eyes.
Listened to the longhouse breathe around him the scrape of a bench moved, a child’s laugh, the low murmur of a conversation too far away to parse.
Kattegat.
Ragnar’s hall.
9th century.
The saga was real and he was in it and the only thing he knew for certain was that Lagertha had said works and the door was still open.
That was the door left open.
He’d walk through it.